What Business Leaders Should Know Now About the Metaverse

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It might still seem like a buzzword, or something that only matters to tech CEOs. But Matthew Ball, CEO of Epyllion and the former global head of strategy for Amazon Studios, says the metaverse is the "new internet" – and that it's already here. He argues that companies large and small need to not only better understand what the metaverse is, but should also be developing strategies around it today. That can have an impact on marketing, customer relations, product development, and much more, he says. Ball is the author of "The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything."

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0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard.
0:49.0	The sci-fi novelist Neil Stevenson coined the term Metaverse in his 1992 books No Crash.
0:54.8	He described a virtual world that people entered to escape the dystopian real world
0:59.2	around them. And we've seen various versions of the same idea appear in other fiction and film
1:03.9	since. What's more, companies like Second Life, Minecraft, and Roblox, have spent the past decade or
1:09.6	two building their own Metaverses. More recently, the biggest tech industry players, from Microsoft,
1:15.6	to Facebook, Nometta, say they're getting in the game. But when we talk about the Metaverse, what exactly do
1:22.3	we mean? What will it take to build it? And do we even want one? Matthew Ball is the CEO of
1:28.0	Appilian, the former head of strategy for Amazon Studios, and the author of the Metaverse and how it
1:33.5	will revolutionize everything. He's here to talk about all things Metaverse. Hi, Matthew. Hi.
1:45.8	So you already heard my first question. What exactly is the Metaverse? How do you define it?
1:51.3	So I define the Metaverse as a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D
1:58.8	virtual worlds, which can be experienced persistently and synchronously by an effectively unlimited
2:05.4	number of users with an individual sense of presence. What's really important to understand is that
2:11.2	is more of a description than it is a definition. The internet is actually defined as the internet
2:16.8	protocol suite, but we find it more helpful to describe it. And what I've described is essentially
2:22.7	a parallel plane of existence, a persistent virtual world that affords us most of the things that we
2:29.3	can do in the real world. We're all in it. It has infinite memory. We can take object A from store A
2:36.0	to store B, and it's a live experience rather than just a static virtual world, such as those we
	...

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